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Gender Values: Meeting the Challenge for STEM Gender Diversity

Establishing family-friendly workplace environments that are conducive to career-life balance is increasingly recognized as a necessary institutional strategy to recruit, retain, and advance diverse faculty in STEM, particularly women. However, the inherent heterogeneity of women in the academic STEM disciplines demands institutional measures that extend beyond mere institutionalized policies, but also holistically capture and honor the intersectional lived experiences of women of all racial/ethnic backgrounds, age groups, and sexual orientations.

The Gender Values Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for Family Friendliness, generously funded by the National Science Foundation, is a powerful, dynamic instrument that has been designed to assist four-year U.S. colleges and universities in tailoring best practices and resources to meet their own unique institutional goals for diversifying STEM faculty. The Gender Values Tool provides an online platform for examining the integrity of family-responsive policies, programs, and practices against an evidence-based framework. Salient topics for exploration include institutional ethos, as well as dependent care/leave and the presence/absence of accountability structures within career-life policies and programs.

As part of our commitment to STEM faculty diversity, AAC&U invites all institutions of higher education to join us in this important work by self-assessing campus capacity for family-friendliness as a function of both institutionalization and inclusivity.

As you prepare to take the Gender Values Institutional Self-Assessment, please note the following:

Your answers are automatically saved as you proceed through the survey.

The context for completing this institutional self-assessment is grounded in the experience of tenure-track faculty.

Assistance and/or expertise from various academic and administrative units on campus may be required to complete the institutional self-assessment.

The self-assessment tool is comprehensive. Thus, it may take more than one sitting to complete. You may return to your institutional self-assessment to make changes as often as needed, but you must consistently do so using the same computer and browser.

Confidentiality

We share your commitment to gender equity in STEM and honor your right to privacy in creating a family-friendly campus that meets the needs of all faculty. Therefore, no identifiable institutional information will ever be used or shared with the public without your written permission.

The Gender Values: Meeting the Challenge for STEM Gender Diversity project is generously funded by the National Science Foundation (#1357697).